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mutata
Mar 1, 2003

What incentive or interest would, say, a Disney animator or a comic book cover artist have had in the early 90s games industry? In this period games were still billed as toys and sold in toy stores. And what draw would the pixel blobs of the NES or the polygonal soup of the N64 have to an illustrator working in his studio? There were no drawing tablets or consumer 3d modeling packages back then; tools were abysmal. Additionally, making games was an extremely technologically complex field. The people who were doing these drawings were programmers and game designers by profession. Art was a side effect of the medium. What we nowadays call programmer art was shipable back then.

It's not really fair to call those dudes out when they were doing art because they had to while working 2 other disciplines. The short answer to your question is they were doing the art because they were already working on the games and they were the best artists in the industry. No other respected professional artist cared to gamble their careers on some new toy industry for nerds.

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BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
The box art for Phalanx sort of answers why bad art existed as it's an attempt to stand out from 40 other covers on the shelf and hopefully draw a sale purely from going "WTF" from looking at the cover and taking it home out of curiosity.

Matt Guss posted:

My ad agency had the Kemco account, and our task was to develop packaging and marketing materials for over 40 titles. Kemco would typically buy their games from 3rd party developers in Japan. Some were good, and some were not good. Weaker games needed more help graphically to get them to stand out on the retail shelf. We wanted people to pick up the package, get engaged with the story, and buy the drat game. The package was also used to help Kemco sell the game to retailers, so it had to make the buyers think the game would sell at their stores (i.e. Walmart, etc.). Most of the games back then were in a look-alike category: same genre, same kind of graphics. Nothing to differentiate them from each other. Keith was not a gamer, and, in fact, none of us were in our agency. But Keith was a brilliant idea guy and always was. We knew the game didn't have a lot to offer, but we wanted to make the package arresting. Keith called this kind of thing the "heavy huh factor." If we couldn't do anything else, we'd try and get the potential purchaser to stare at the package and try and figure out what just happened. Today it might be called a WTF moment.

So Keith could have done some predictable spaceship shooting bullshit that would have been like every other game out there. Or he could create a story that would make people stop and think about it. And I guess it's proof that was a good idea because people are still thinking about it. Phalanx was a very average game with an unexpected cover design. It needed a great/weird idea to stand out from the crowd.

Whistling Asshole
Nov 18, 2005

hackbunny posted:

Any idea why in the 90s so many non-Japanese games, even high profile games, hired absolutely terrible concept and cover artists? Amateurish linework, janky anatomy, abysmal coloring etc. I say non-Japanese because I'm left with the impression that the Japanese hired actual professionals instead of comic book industry rejects

You should separate concept art and cover art because they're two very different things that serve two very different purposes. Concept art is cranked out at a fast pace in order to generate a bunch of different ideas for 3d artists. It isn't supposed to have the level of polish that cover art has. There's no way in hell that "Wombat Ruff #1" drawing from Crash Bandicoot was used in any kind of marketing capacity. It looks like it was done in 5 minutes. Those super rough sketches might end up in commemorative or retrospective packages years later, but not a single one of those looks like it was initially created for public use.

Cover art is usually the domain of the publisher. Like WebDog quoted, sometimes external ad agencies might be used or the publisher might have their own in-house designers and artists that they use to keep brand consistency across releases by different developers.

Besides needing to differentiate between cover art and concept art, you're making some pretty terrible generalizations and the examples you used to back them up are awful. You cherrypicked some of the roughest, earliest pieces of concept art possible as examples of bad Western artists. Those "amateurish" drawings by Toby Gard were the genesis of literally billions of dollars in revenue.

Here's some pretty good cover art done by Western artists for games in the 90s:

http://www.boxequalsart.com/borisvallejo.html
http://www.boxequalsart.com/juliebellartistpage.html

And a few comparison pages that prove sometimes the Western versions are head and shoulders above their Japanese counterparts:

https://boxartcomparisons.tumblr.com/
http://timewarpgamer.com/features/box_art_disparity_nes.html

I don't mean to pick on you but there's nothing I hate more in the world than lazy, sweeping generalizations. With literally 5 minutes of research you could have typed "box art comparisons" into Google and seen how off-base your point was.

shame on an IGA
Apr 8, 2005

Mega Man.

hackbunny
Jul 22, 2007

I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

Whistling rear end in a top hat posted:

I don't mean to pick on you but there's nothing I hate more in the world than lazy, sweeping generalizations. With literally 5 minutes of research you could have typed "box art comparisons" into Google and seen how off-base your point was.

I had no "point". I remembered atrocious concept art from the 90s, I looked for it, I found it. I'm not here to attack or defend the honor of anyone, because frankly, it's pointless: not only the quality of concept art rarely reflected on the quality of assets (case in point: Command & Conquer had kick-loving-rear end concept art that was completely thrown away and replaced with generic crap), but after a little research it turned out that this kind of "school notebook doodle" concept art was a very small minority of the cases (e.g. I was surprised at how good the concept art for Diablo was, and of course there's all the Designers Republic games, that were basically playable concept art). So what? it's still crappy art that ended up printed in magazines and was supposed to drum up attention for the game, and I want to know the circumstances that lead a studio to make a misstep like that

hackbunny fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Jan 5, 2018

hackbunny
Jul 22, 2007

I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

OneEightHundred posted:

Charles Zembillas worked on kids' TV shows before he worked on Crash, and most of the other ones listed were mixed-role.

Another interesting one is Blood's Kevin Kilstrom, who was actually a prop maker: the game sprites were digitized photos of stop-motion puppets he had made (IIRC this is how Doom sprites were made as well). Some good:



Some, eh, not as good:



Eric Kohler did the concept art for for Blood II, and it was much, much better. No more puppets either, the game was in full 3D. Not that better art and slicker graphics made Blood II a better game, anyway...

floofyscorp
Feb 12, 2007

hackbunny posted:

the circumstances that lead a studio to make a misstep like that

I mean, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, Doom, Warcraft... I think these games did pretty okay despite the 'misstep'. It's just production art. Not all production art is a polished masterpiece.

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


Some of those pictures are also literally 25 years old and artists like Samwise have improved considerably in you know, almost three decades of craft. Nobody was expecting high quality work at the time because the demand wasn't there, now original art is probably the single most expensive element of video game production.

hackbunny
Jul 22, 2007

I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

floofyscorp posted:

I mean, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, Doom, Warcraft... I think these games did pretty okay despite the 'misstep'.

Yes, and for many games the imperfect art (that often - but not always - reflected on the game graphics) was a great part of the charm. But could they afford it now? ever again? That's why I specified "the 90s"

floofyscorp posted:

It's just production art. Not all production art is a polished masterpiece.

Agh, what's so hard to understand? Sure, Diablo concept art was a series of "polished masterpieces", seriously, look at them, they're so beautiful and stylish I almost doubt their practical value. Resident Evil's, to name one of a majority of others, was rough and utilitarian. But come on, Dungeon Keeper's was made by a high school doodler (and I say this as a prolific high school doodler who would have killed for a chance to do concept art for a videogame). You need at least someone on the team who understands the basics of character design (or even draw an uninterrupted line longer than half an inch... like knows like) and won't just throw random muscles horns and spikes around

exquisite tea posted:

Nobody was expecting high quality work at the time because the demand wasn't there, now original art is probably the single most expensive element of video game production.

Yes, this is my point. It may be a naive question, but why's that? Is it just heightened expectations, or is it a production requirement now?

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

Video games are a visual medium so therefore the visuals are pushed and developed in various ways like technological complexity, art direction, concept and design. Better visuals are a way to make a better product. Audiences expect good/engaging visuals in their visual entertainment.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the visuals for all games have to be top of the line expensive, of course, but pushing the line graphically is part of the games industry which is in many ways an industry that marries art and tech.

Chev
Jul 19, 2010
Switchblade Switcharoo

hackbunny posted:

Agh, what's so hard to understand? Sure, Diablo concept art was a series of "polished masterpieces", seriously, look at them, they're so beautiful and stylish I almost doubt their practical value.
Those are from the first Diablo's manual and it's just as full of lackluster Samwise or Metzen drawings, half of them ripping off warhammer, as the Warcraft 2 manual is. You merely cherry-picked the three exceptions and pretended they were indicative of an actual trend rather than just one guy at Blizzard back then being a better artist than the observed average.

Chev fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jan 5, 2018

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


The art in those 90s Blizzard manuals isn't much different from what you'd see in any monster manual or D&D rulebooks from the same era, the closest analogues to video games from where they took much of their inspiration. If you're asking why the bar is set much higher now that video games are a multibillion dollar industry, then well that kinda answers its own question doesn't it.

hackbunny
Jul 22, 2007

I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

Chev posted:

You merely cherry-picked the three exceptions and pretended they were indicative of an actual trend rather than just one guy at Blizzard back then being a better artist than the observed average.

Make up your minds guys, did I cherry pick bad artists or did I cherry pick good artists? I've been literally going through huge Wikipedia lists of 90s videogames, taking the most popular games and searching for their concept art on Google Images. That's like the diametrical opposite of cherry picking, and I've been learning a lot. I had started with the assumption things were much worse, in fact

The truth is that the vast majority of artists were clearly professionals of varying levels of skill, a small minority were legit capital-A Artists (e.g. PaRappa the Rapper's Rodney Greenblat), and the rest were blatant amateurs (some haven't even improved since - yeah you Toby Gard, I've seen your Legend sketches). I've done some pretty lackluster work myself at the start of my career (programmer) and I wonder sometimes by what miracle they kept me. I've also explained that, as a fellow (former) amateur artist who could make passable art, I can tell when another artist doesn't quite clear the bar for "professional"

exquisite tea posted:

The art in those 90s Blizzard manuals isn't much different from what you'd see in any monster manual or D&D rulebooks from the same era,

YEP. That era's Magic: The Gathering cards too. Remember the time an artist misread "tome" as "tomb"? and Wizards of the Coast went "eh, that'll do" and printed a "tome" card illustrated with a tomb? And it was some character's tome/tomb, so they had to kill him off to make the tomb make sense?

exquisite tea posted:

If you're asking why the bar is set much higher now that video games are a multibillion dollar industry, then well that kinda answers its own question doesn't it.

No I'm asking why art (as opposed to modelling etc.) is now such a big part of a game's budget

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

Is there something with the existing answers that doesn't sit right with you? Asking for reals.

Edit: So I consider modeling to be firmly on the art side of game production, and I do think I'm alone in that. What is your understanding of what makes up art for games and it's percentage of the budget?

mutata fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Jan 5, 2018

hackbunny
Jul 22, 2007

I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

mutata posted:

Is there something with the existing answers that doesn't sit right with you? Asking for reals.

No, I understand the answers and they make sense. I just don't want people to think I'm going for a shallow "superior Hanzo art folded a million times" point. Hell, I even found perfect counterexamples with PaRappa (Japanese game, good American artist) and Shogo (American game, awful Japanese artist)

mutata posted:

What is your understanding of what makes up art for games and it's percentage of the budget?

I don't understand much, a good half or more of the roles in the "door question" were new to me. I was like "this makes sense" but also "it's an actual job description?". I'm probably seriously underestimating how many people work on a modern game

hackbunny fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Jan 5, 2018

GeeCee
Dec 16, 2004

:scotland::glomp:

"You're going to be...amazing."

hackbunny posted:

and the rest were blatant amateurs (some haven't even improved since - yeah you Toby Gard, I've seen your Legend sketches). I've done some pretty lackluster work myself at the start of my career (programmer) and I wonder sometimes by what miracle they kept me. I've also explained that, as a fellow (former) amateur artist who could make passable art, I can tell when another artist doesn't quite clear the bar for "professional"

Don't poo poo on other game professionals. Like, as a rule, just don't.

You've not walked a mile in Gard's shoes, you don't know of what he contributed to Tomb Raider and the industry is a very small world.

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

hackbunny posted:

No, I understand the answers and they make sense. I just don't want people to think I'm going for a shallow "superior Hanzo art folded a million times" point. Hell, I even found perfect counterexamples with PaRappa (Japanese game, good American artist) and Shogo (American game, awful Japanese artist)


I don't understand much, a good half or more of the roles in the "door question" were new to me. I was like "this makes sense" but also "it's an actual job description?". I'm probably seriously underestimating how many people work on a modern game

Gotcha. Yeah, as far as "art budget" goes, that includes all of asset production where is where the armies of people and millions of dollars goes. Concept is relatively cheap in comparison because a good piece of concept can solve 3 dozen problems but an asset only solves the problem of "We need that asset". Concept is the top of the funnel and asset production is the bottleneck.

Gerblyn
Apr 4, 2007

"TO BATTLE!"
Fun Shoe
I think one of the biggest differences between now and the 90s is that, in the 90s, computers weren't really capable of producing 3D art to a degree which really demanded super refined and rendered 2D concept art. You can mock the Lara Croft concepts all you like, but when they got into the game, they looked like the model on the left:



The main purposes of concept art is to guide the modellers and texture artists, and you can see that even the roughest of the concept art you posted was far in excess of what was technically needed. To produce the model on the right though, the modellers are going to want a much more richly detailed and worked out piece of concept art, simply because what they themselves are making is also much more richly detailed and worked out.

Or to put it another way, one reason a lot of concept art in the 90s looked rough, is because there was little reason to spend the time or money to produce concept art that didn't, and now there is.

hackbunny
Jul 22, 2007

I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

Gerblyn posted:

I think one of the biggest differences between now and the 90s is that, in the 90s, computers weren't really capable of producing 3D art to a degree which really demanded super refined and rendered 2D concept art.

Oh of course. Broken Sword was a 2D game and it had like, perfect concept art. And then there's the funny part where multiple games with sprites used stop motion puppets instead of, you know, pixel art. It's not like there was a dearth of pixel artists in America at the time, it seems that basically 100% of Amiga games had hand-drawn pixel art, and Amiga wasn't an obscure platform either. All signs seem to point to a pretty insular culture, plus a huge commitment to immature technologies (motion capture, 3D, CGI) in the name of "realism"

hackbunny fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jan 5, 2018

GeeCee
Dec 16, 2004

:scotland::glomp:

"You're going to be...amazing."
Hey hackbunny, you PMed me instead of responding here, must have been a mistake.



My point with that is that everyone talks to each other. Talk shite about one guy and there's a good chance someone knows them, it's a great way to filter oneself out of job apps. I offer that as advice, not a threat. Slagging on someone's work comes across as very unprofessional.

GeeCee fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jan 5, 2018

hackbunny
Jul 22, 2007

I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

GC_ChrisReeves posted:

Hey hackbunny, you PMed me instead of responding here, must have been a mistake.

Nice derail fucktard. You talk a big deal but then you do this childish poo poo

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Gearman
Dec 6, 2011

hackbunny posted:

Nice derail fucktard. You talk a big deal but then you do this childish poo poo
He's giving you some very good advice. Not just for game development, but for your professional career. You're also calling a developer a "fucktard" in a thread where they're taking time out of their day to answer your questions about their industry. How do you think other developers are going to respond to you in the future after seeing this?

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

Well seeing as how the posed questions have been sufficiently answered to the point where we've moved on to personal attacks and slipping into each other's PMs, let's call this one finished and move on, eh?

GAME PRO PRO TIP: Being a dork on the internet still isn't a good look. Also, shoot the Cyberdemon with rockets until it dies.

GeeCee
Dec 16, 2004

:scotland::glomp:

"You're going to be...amazing."
Question I have for you. I just came out of my first time trying Oculus Medium and I have to wonder.

Do any of y'all see VR tools entering some kind of professional Non-VR game artist workflow? Like how Wacom Cintiqs are in no way essential to game art creation in the least but are drat nice to use?

GeeCee fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jan 6, 2018

Chernabog
Apr 16, 2007



Well, as an artist I consider wacoms to be absolutely essential... unless you are making hard surface modeling maybe?

I haven't used any VR art tools yet but at this point they seem more like a gimmick.

Phobeste
Apr 9, 2006

never, like, count out Touchdown Tom, man

Gearman posted:

He's giving you some very good advice. Not just for game development, but for your professional career. You're also calling a developer a "fucktard" in a thread where they're taking time out of their day to answer your questions about their industry. How do you think other developers are going to respond to you in the future after seeing this?

Freaking lol at giving hackbunny career advice

For those of you that have been programmers in other subdisciplines as well as video games, what stands out as similar and different to you, especially on the other-than-writing-code side? Like, are the business and teams organized similarly? Do you use many of the same tools? Do you have similar conflicts?

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Phobeste posted:

Freaking lol at giving hackbunny career advice

For those of you that have been programmers in other subdisciplines as well as video games, what stands out as similar and different to you, especially on the other-than-writing-code side? Like, are the business and teams organized similarly? Do you use many of the same tools? Do you have similar conflicts?

On the back end, it’s all basically the same poo poo. On the front end, you need to be mindful of things that will cause your frame rate to drop.

Perforce is prevalent as the version control system (though I prefer, and many smaller teams use, git). Testing (on the front end) is often just not done outside manual testing. Jira is standard.

By and large, it’s very similar to other sorts of non-JavaScript dev I’ve done.

Sometimes there’s different words for roles; eg producer vs project manager. Generally just window dressing.

Only conflict that is different is with creative and design. Creative wants things to look pretty; you have to occasionally tell them no (more often, offer suggestions of things similar to what they ask for) because what they want would blow your frame budget. Design can be more challenging; that’s where game feel and other soft requirements usually come in. Dealing with design can be like working with a product owner that changes their mind on what they want week over week; especially on new projects. In the best case they’ve already prototypes the systems before they ask you to build them into the rest of the game.

My current game has a couple development teams. Back end, two client teams, and an events team. Design and QA (manual testers) are embedded in the teams; art is generally a separate thing, but there are a few people embedded as well. Separately there’s the business analysts, IT/admin staff, etc.

The office environment is generally a bit more fun than most non-games places I’ve worked. Essentially everyone has a shared hobby in games, so there’s always /some/ common ground with coworkers in a social setting.

OneEightHundred
Feb 28, 2008

Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Whistling rear end in a top hat posted:

Cover art is usually the domain of the publisher.
The extent to which it's the domain of the publisher has decreased though, there's much more focus on consistency and IP opportunities now, like any game shipping today is going to make drat sure that the main character has the same design in-game, on the cover, and in the marketing material, and they're much less likely to have different art styles in different territories.

Game art and marketing used to be much more hands-off like they were with books, and imports were often especially hands-off. The Phalanx cover is an obvious case, but publishers would happily do stuff like rewrite the entire backstory in the manual because nobody really cared and most games weren't developed with a mind toward establishing an IP.

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

Disney Infinity had a marketing department that painted campaign narratives that weren't factually present in the game, so I imagine that's a common marketing/dev disconnect. Fans and players sarcastically spitting our own marketing campaign slogan "IF YOU CAN DREAM IT, YOU CAN DO IT" back at us when obvious, blatant, often frustrating limitations cropped up was common and we devs were just as angry as they were because we couldn't deliver what marketing was promising and marketing wouldn't reign in their dreamspeak.

Whistling Asshole
Nov 18, 2005

OneEightHundred posted:

The extent to which it's the domain of the publisher has decreased though, there's much more focus on consistency and IP opportunities now, like any game shipping today is going to make drat sure that the main character has the same design in-game, on the cover, and in the marketing material, and they're much less likely to have different art styles in different territories.

That's true. I mostly meant for the era of games hackbunny was talking about. Nowadays physical releases are less of a thing and for the games that do make it to store shelves, the box art is depressingly homogeneous.

For example, https://venturebeat.com/2012/07/15/you-cant-un-see-these-11-video-game-box-art-cliches/

Whistling Asshole
Nov 18, 2005

mutata posted:

Disney Infinity had a marketing department that painted campaign narratives that weren't factually present in the game, so I imagine that's a common marketing/dev disconnect. Fans and players sarcastically spitting our own marketing campaign slogan "IF YOU CAN DREAM IT, YOU CAN DO IT" back at us when obvious, blatant, often frustrating limitations cropped up was common and we devs were just as angry as they were because we couldn't deliver what marketing was promising and marketing wouldn't reign in their dreamspeak.

If there's ever been a slogan the game industry has lived and died on, it's "overpromise, under-deliver"

GeeCee
Dec 16, 2004

:scotland::glomp:

"You're going to be...amazing."

Whistling rear end in a top hat posted:

That's true. I mostly meant for the era of games hackbunny was talking about. Nowadays physical releases are less of a thing and for the games that do make it to store shelves, the box art is depressingly homogeneous.

For example, https://venturebeat.com/2012/07/15/you-cant-un-see-these-11-video-game-box-art-cliches/

I think that article is a bit unfair. There are enough games out there now that every variation in cover art has kinda been done a lot, especially with certain genres taking prevalence, plus it still has to communicate the game's purpose to the average casual gamer or non-gamer. To go minimalist is often for the games which can survive on brand name alone.

Now mobile games icon art on the other hand...hard to go anywhere on app stores now without some clone of the clash of clans dude going AGHGHG at you.

GeeCee fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Jan 6, 2018

limaCAT
Dec 22, 2007

il pistone e male
Slippery Tilde
Save for the various "paperclip maximization" reasons where it would probably be too costly to support a system versus the benefits given, why big publishers haven't yet greenlit a system where their online store are just an already launched game instance with a 3D world (and all the features being represented like if it were in playstation home or second life) and games just sold like access to attractions and launched like entering a section in a theme park?

I think only playstation home tried that, but the baffling thing is that Sony swore that it worked and made them money (save for killing it, which makes me think that Home did not work that well from a monetary or an advertisement standpoint)... On the other hand if the store were the game you could have people learning one set of conventions to operate both the game and store.

Second question: I can see graphics getting more complex but save for a few titles, AI or gameplay systems aren't scaling like graphics. I guess that in 2017 we could have had a game of The Sims with the same environmental density or complexity as Bioshock Infinite (or games like said Bioshock Infinite could have been better and more complex than System Shock). Why don't we get a new Ultima Underworld? Why is the industry relegating complexity to niche or kickstarted games?

floofyscorp
Feb 12, 2007

limaCAT posted:

Save for the various "paperclip maximization" reasons where it would probably be too costly to support a system versus the benefits given, why big publishers haven't yet greenlit a system where their online store are just an already launched game instance with a 3D world (and all the features being represented like if it were in playstation home or second life) and games just sold like access to attractions and launched like entering a section in a theme park?

I suppose one obvious drawback to this is that games are not always bought by game-savvy people(or those who don't own a device capable of playing said games) so you'd need a traditional storefront of some kind anyway, unless you want to lock out the 'parents buying games for their kids' demographic entirely.

limaCAT posted:

On the other hand if the store were the game you could have people learning one set of conventions to operate both the game and store.

This only works if your store sells exactly one kind of game?

GeeCee
Dec 16, 2004

:scotland::glomp:

"You're going to be...amazing."

limaCAT posted:

Second question: I can see graphics getting more complex but save for a few titles, AI or gameplay systems aren't scaling like graphics. I guess that in 2017 we could have had a game of The Sims with the same environmental density or complexity as Bioshock Infinite (or games like said Bioshock Infinite could have been better and more complex than System Shock). Why don't we get a new Ultima Underworld? Why is the industry relegating complexity to niche or kickstarted games?

I think good game AI is hard to demonstrate and advertise nowadays, only the most interested of gamers are going to appreciate when it's done well. And with that, I suspect AI complexity has quietly been chugging along in it's own lane, you just don't hear about it the way like we did in the days before Oblivion (Full day AI cycles!) released. From purely a gamer's perspective, MGS5s AI is utterly superb yet it rarely gets much praise. Good AI may just be being taken for granted nowadays.

As for gameplay, I suspect the conservative approach there is due to games being bigger investment risks than ever now and changing a previously winning formula without good reason might make the money-givers butts pucker a bit. So yeah, Indies have much more room to play about.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

GC_ChrisReeves posted:

I think good game AI is hard to demonstrate and advertise nowadays, only the most interested of gamers are going to appreciate when it's done well. And with that, I suspect AI complexity has quietly been chugging along in it's own lane, you just don't hear about it the way like we did in the days before Oblivion (Full day AI cycles!) released. From purely a gamer's perspective, MGS5s AI is utterly superb yet it rarely gets much praise. Good AI may just be being taken for granted nowadays.

As for gameplay, I suspect the conservative approach there is due to games being bigger investment risks than ever now and changing a previously winning formula without good reason might make the money-givers butts pucker a bit. So yeah, Indies have much more room to play about.

AI has stagnated a bit, which has been a topic at the GDC ai roundtables and ai summit for the past few years. Essentially the last major breakthrough was with behavior trees; right around the time halo (2?) came out.

There’s been some improvement to procedural generation since then, but nothing crazy. Most of the stuff coming out now in that realm are follow-ons from deep learning and other well funded initiatives.

It’s just a hard problem, and academia isn’t terribly interested in game ai, which has timing constraints not present in general decision management or planning. Not many organizations are interested in a multi-year effort to improve on the state of the art with no guarantees of success for results pretty much no one will care about.

Complexity has mostly been increasing with the number of nodes in behavior trees. Essentially more cases and granularity of the same thing.

OneEightHundred
Feb 28, 2008

Soon, we will be unstoppable!

leper khan posted:

It’s just a hard problem, and academia isn’t terribly interested in game ai, which has timing constraints not present in general decision management or planning. Not many organizations are interested in a multi-year effort to improve on the state of the art with no guarantees of success for results pretty much no one will care about.
The problem of academic interest is that there are basically two completely different reasons to make a game AI:

One of them, semi-common in board games and strategy games, is to be as good as possible at beating opponents, or at least as good as whatever constraints are imposed to control its difficulty, and that type of thing is of interest to academia because it's useful elsewhere. Timing constraints are definitely not a barrier to academic research, there's been work on stuff like Starcraft and Doom bots and training self-driving cars in GTA entirely because so many useful applications of AI in things like robotics and self-driving cars have to be done in real time.

The other one is the one that you see in most game NPCs, which is not to make an effective AI, but more of a systemic performance, and the goal is to be interesting and fun to play against. A lot of being fun is things like giving enemies a distinct identity, and making them seem fair (which means, more than anything, giving the player a huge information advantage), but actual intelligence is often counterproductive. Most of the interest now is in group and emergent behaviors so that the AIs are more interesting and do more things.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Jan 8, 2018

Mr.48
May 1, 2007

leper khan posted:

It’s just a hard problem, and academia isn’t terribly interested in game ai, which has timing constraints not present in general decision management or planning. Not many organizations are interested in a multi-year effort to improve on the state of the art with no guarantees of success for results pretty much no one will care about.

There is plenty of interest in it in academia, the problem is the lack of funding. Typically speaking this is not an area that you can get government grants to research, and funding from the entertainment industry is a pittance. As a result the vast majority of academic research being done in this area is in researchers' spare time, and accordingly the output is a trickle instead a flood.

djkillingspree
Apr 2, 2001
make a hole with a gun perpendicular

OneEightHundred posted:

The problem of academic interest is that there are basically two completely different reasons to make a game AI:

One of them, semi-common in board games and strategy games, is to be as good as possible at beating opponents, or at least as good as whatever constraints are imposed to control its difficulty, and that type of thing is of interest to academia because it's useful elsewhere. Timing constraints are definitely not a barrier to academic research, there's been work on stuff like Starcraft and Doom bots and training self-driving cars in GTA entirely because so many useful applications of AI in things like robotics and self-driving cars have to be done in real time.

The other one is the one that you see in most game NPCs, which is not to make an effective AI, but more of a systemic performance, and the goal is to be interesting and fun to play against. A lot of being fun is things like giving enemies a distinct identity, and making them seem fair (which means, more than anything, giving the player a huge information advantage), but actual intelligence is often counterproductive. Most of the interest now is in group and emergent behaviors so that the AIs are more interesting and do more things.

The second point here is something really interesting to me, because it's one of those areas where game design and engineering heavily interact. In many cases the larger challenge is to define the role your AI should play, rather than just trying to make them as smart as possible. In that respect designing AIs for games becomes a much more subjective goal - often, you want them to *seem* smart while *actually* being quite predictable. It's often better to think of AIs as playing a role vs. trying to be as smart as possible, and it's a mix of design and code to get them to play it.

On the other hand, something that doesn't get a lot of fanfare, but is a huge deal, are the massive advances made in the capability of AIs to navigate environments. In order for a game like Assassin's Creed to work, for example, a fairly large number of AIs need to be able to understand how to navigate a fairly complex environment that can't be defined with a simple navmesh. Those kinds of advances don't get super-buzzwordy-reveals, but it's important to remember that in many games 5-10 years ago, enemies couldn't even figure out how to climb ladders, jump over gaps, or take cover behind objects without a human annotating the environment. I'm sure there's still some hand annotation going on in newer games, but it's clear that AIs have gotten drastically better at navigation in open world games over time. This is an extremely hard problem and has a ton of good work being done on it all the time.

Also, for AI advances, the recent Alien Creative Assembly game seemed to be a pretty impressive case of a complex AI that played a role really well. There's definitely a lot of stuff going on with developments in AI, I just think it's being presented more in the context of gameplay (which is good)

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Chernabog
Apr 16, 2007



Are Facebook/Web games still a thing?
Or has that moved mostly to apps?

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